Plant journal, dream journal, gratitude journal, bullet journal, fitness journal-there is a journal for everyone and everything.
I have one journal.
One journal that I spill everything into- my thoughts, my feelings, my observations, poems, song lyrics, daily to-do’s, work brainstorming, for the most part it’s all in a journal that at the start was meant to be a the beginnings of my life long memoir. Something that would be passed down or kept in a home library.
My first diary was when in 1996. Without anyone telling me what I should write inside, I just went in and wrote about a fun day I spent with my then best friend and from there it grew to writing about the fun days I had as a 6-10 year old so I would always remember that day and twenty-ish years later, I still have this diary. It’s still intact and it still holds the memories of fun play dates I had with my friend Naadiya, peppered with entries of my frustration of my father not wanting to get a dog. Bummer!
Writing in my diary soon turned to writing in my journal. There were periods where I’d abandon it for many months, even up to a year but I always found myself coming back to it. The difference now was that I ran to my journal with my hardest felt emotions- my sadness, my heartbreaks. I’d write about the incompatibility that grew between my parents, my mothers sadness, my dads impatience and anger, my feeling of disconnect for the society around me and my confusion with boys. Unbeknownst to me at the very beginning, my journal was a self-care practice that later on not only turned into my first self published poetry book but would be a cherished practice I do on a daily basis.
As a writer, my journal writing and my writing writing is different. I have an appreciation for words and I believer them not only to be beautiful but also very powerful (a deadly combination might I add).
I hesitantly want to say that most of us live with stress and anxiety on a daily basis. I don’t have to tell you that that is not okay on so many levels and it’s affecting how we live our lives. If you don’t practice journaling, it’s easy to see how that can add to the category of another thing to add to your day but it doesn’t have to be so. If you can dedicate a slot in your day to sit down with yourself and be vulnerable with your truth, it can have profound effects on your overall well being.
For the month of March we are going to be featuring daily self-reflection prompts on our instagram stories. So if you’re a journal-er in a dry spell or if you’re new to journaling we have you covered!
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